Another day, another Doom port. This time it appears that it's the turn of the Atari ST to get its own version of Doom, with the developer Jonas "Indyjo" Eschenburg flexing their porting skills to try to get the ID Software's iconic first-person shooter up and running on the classic computer (thanks tomshardware!)
As Eschenburg notes as a disclaimer, STDOOM, as the project is called, currently runs on an emulated Atari STE with 8MB of RAM "accelerated to ludicrous speed", so you probably shouldn't expect anything playable just yet on real ST/STE hardware and shouldn't expect too much for the time being.
Nevertheless, the plan is to continuously improve the port over time, with the goal eventually being to get it up and running on those platforms.
In order to do this, the developer has already had to face a few different challenges associated with working inside the hardware limitations of the classic machine, such as only having the ability to display 16 colours at the time.
As a result, this has led to Eschenburg having to squeeze Doom's 256 colours into a significantly reduced palette, which has been carefully chosen to allow him to use a dithering effect to create the illusion of more.
Eschenburg posted an image of his first attempts at dithering, over on Twitter/X earlier this month, transforming the project from its original grayscale demo to a truly impressive recreation of the original, and since then, it appears he's continued to refine things further to remove some of the noise that emerged in his initial experiments.
In addition to that, he's also stated that he's got keyboard support up and running — another important step towards producing a project that players can get their hands on.
If you want to keep track of the progress of the project, we recommend following Eschenburg at @indyjonas. You can also check out the GitHub project here.